Tuesday, January 03, 2006

What is "Cultural Imperialism," anyway? Anthony Appiah

It's a very rich piece, full of interesting examples of contemporary cultural change and hybridity, including many from Appiah's own Asante community in Ghana. But there is a powerful single thesis underlying it all, which Appiah returns to in each section: people ought to be free to choose what they like.

Appiah is skeptical about movements to protect the sanctity of "cultural difference" or diversity. Human cultures cannot be thought of in biological metaphors (i.e., genetics), partly because in liberal thinking the rights of individuals to choose their values supercedes the sanctity of the community that surrounds them. In other words, if I am an African who wants to wear t-shirts and jeans instead of traditional African attire, my right to do so ought to be protected even if someone feels I am damaging "tradition." And "cultural imperialism" is a bad term -- suited for shrill polemic rather than actual analysis.

The standard example that is brought up whenever one gets into debates about globalization and cross-cultural interaction is the American, British (and, via Rupert Murdoch, Australian) dominance of the global mass-media. But even if the infrastructure of globalization has favored American programming in the global marketplace, recent scholarship questions whether people around the world receive American cultural artifacts passively. Building on work done by Larry Strelitz, Appiah argues that people respond to foreign cultural artifacts through their own culturally-specific lenses:

And one thing they've found is that how people respond to these cultural imports depends on their existing cultural context. When the media scholar Larry Strelitz spoke to students from KwaZulu-Natal, he found that they were anything but passive vessels. One of them, Sipho - a self-described "very, very strong Zulu man" - reported that he had drawn lessons from watching the American soap opera "Days of Our Lives," "especially relationship-wise." It fortified his view that "if a guy can tell a woman that he loves her, she should be able to do the same." What's more, after watching the show, Sipho "realized that I should be allowed to speak to my father. He should be my friend rather than just my father." It seems doubtful that that was the intended message of multinational capitalism's ruling sector.

But Sipho's response also confirmed that cultural consumers are not dupes. They can adapt products to suit their own needs, and they can decide for themselves what they do and do not approve of. Here's Sipho again:

"In terms of our culture, a girl is expected to enter into relationships when she is about 20. In the Western culture, a girl can be exposed to a relationship as early as 15 or 16. That one we shouldn't adopt in our culture. Another thing we shouldn't adopt from the Western culture has to do with the way they treat elderly people. I wouldn't like my family to be sent into an old-age home."

It wouldn't matter whether the "old-age homes" in American soap operas were safe places, full of kindly people. That wouldn't sell the idea to Sipho. Dutch viewers of "Dallas" saw not the pleasures of conspicuous consumption among the superrich - the message that theorists of "cultural imperialism" find in every episode - but a reminder that money and power don't protect you from tragedy. Israeli Arabs saw a program that confirmed that women abused by their husbands should return to their fathers. Mexican telenovelas remind Ghanaian women that, where sex is at issue, men are not to be trusted. If the telenovelas tried to tell them otherwise, they wouldn't believe it.

Talk of cultural imperialism "structuring the consciousnesses" of those in the periphery treats people like Sipho as blank slates on which global capitalism's moving finger writes its message, leaving behind another cultural automaton as it moves on. It is deeply condescending. And it isn't true.

I agree with this. Just as violent video games do not make children go out and kill people, foreign TV shows do not make viewers into passive receivers of cultural values. Viewers read the shows with their own interests and preoccupations in mind, and their resistance to what they see of America through TV (as in the case of Sipho above) is not always the politically correct kind of "resistance."

The other example that is often discussed (and this is not in Appiah's essay, but in my own conversations with friends an family) is a concern that aesthetic values are becoming more homogeneous because of greater American penetration of global markets. This is especially problematic with Bollywood films and film music, which, rumor has it, now blindly copy American script ideas.

But is it really true across the board? First of all, Indian "copies" of American films often have interesting deviations from the American plots, generally in a conservative, pro-family direction, something that was especially marked in Murder (2004), the adaptation of Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, but which can also be seen in loose adaptations like Salaam Namaste (9 Months). And one suspects the more conservative ending of Murder had more to do with the censor board than with the vision of the director. What does it say when the number one protector of "Indian values" in Bollywood cinema is actually an obsolete and repressive institution like the censor board?

Analogously, isn't it true that b-grade Bollywood movies (which dominate the industry) have always copied foreign films, while more serious efforts, such as Pakeezah (then) or Parineeta (now) have been few and far between? Remember, back in the "golden days of Hindi cinema," for every Pakeezah that was made, there was also an Aatank!

In short, I don't really believe the term "cultural imperialism" is relevant, not these days. There is, admittedly, an often alarming dominance by the western media in the global marketplace of ideas and images, but that dominance is arguable, because a) it might not be as extensive as people think, b) it might have more to do with branding, marketing, and corporate efficiency than political dominance, and c) it is dependent on the free choice of global consumers.

4 comments:

I think it's all of the above. In the absence of institutional coercion (foreign occupation, religious fundamentalism etc.), changes in cultural values are a matter of free choice. The change occurs on two parallel tracks. One happens because it makes life easier for the doer, the other, when society at large sees no gross transgression in the change. The latter can occur due to rational debate within the society about existing norms or by exposure to external influences.

For example, most working women in urban India now wear Shalwar Kameez or trouser suits to work. The sari is losing its popularity in the workaday life. There are two "cultural" phenomena at work here. Women feel infinitely more liberated (physically) in these outfits and a public exposed to western women in pants is culturally prepared to accept the look. If trousers were not the convenience they are, women in India would not have adopted them, no matter what they saw in American movies and media. And as a nod to local sensibilities, I have seen women, especially in small towns, wrap a shawl or a scarf over the shirt-trouser outfit. A perfect compromise between convenience of the west and respect for domestic culture.

The spike in Indian divorce rates is also often blamed on "western" culture. Not so. Marriages that are breaking up, were rotting at the core for their own reasons. Now there is a civic and legal mechanism by which couples (and especially women) can walk away from a failed relationship and not face the stigma previously attached to divorce. Women's education and increased economic power make it possible, not Hollywood.

As for political dominance, there is probably a tangential effect of that. If another society is seen as more successful, prosperous, happy and healthy, there is a natural tendency to believe that "they" must be doing something right. But here too the choice is a rational and a deliberate one - not necessarily by undue influence. (Just a joke: My father, whenever he was exasperated by the failings of the Indian government and society, would quip, "India would get nowhere until beef eating is legal!)

Amardeep - opendemocracy.net has a whole section devoted to questions of global media ownership and flows. Its a great resource, esp for an undergrad course.http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-globalmediaownership/issue.jsp

Excellent observations, Amardeep. I agree with how cultural exports are perceived in different settings and the take-out value of each of them differs. I also think the environment/location where it is being viewed matters. eg: When I first started watching Simpsons after coming to US, the first 2-3 weeks I could never "get" what was so funny about it. My reaction to the whole hype was "Duh!"(pun intended). All I could notice was Homer's ugly mouth and never understood why talking rudely to elders/parents was so funny.But over a period of time I started to see why it is downright hilarious. This is not to say that I am now totally Americanised or some such thing, just that I have sufficient exposure to American society/lifestyle and so I am able to appreciate the finer points it makes (tho every now and then that ugly mouth still bothers me, but most of the time it's now transparent :). So I guess perspective matters too. I don't think I'd have perceived Simpsons in the same way if I was watching it in India.Thanks for writing that post.

I recently started read this interesting blog. It is interesting how you mostly compare influence of Hollywood on Bollywood (Hindi movies, as I prefer call them :)) when discussing cultural imperialism. I think cultural imperialism, or lack there of, is much more than movies. It is the idea of what a culture is. When an Indian teenager eats french fries, say for the first time, at an Indian McDonald's, she is biting into her image (or culture) of US.

The issue is not blind copying - it almost never happens. But the issue is how much influence does it play. When kids play violent video games they don't become killers, but they surely lose their inhibition to violence (Columbine killers lost their inhibition to kill from movies - it is not say there were no teenage killers before, but losing inhibition helps).

Ruchira's comment about Indian women dresses is a good example of cultural influence and lose of inhibition due to that influence. When influence becomes the norm, and it is not innocent anymore, it becomes imperialism. And something is lost when an imperialist take over - not always innocent and a good thing.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.